San Diego County’s brewers will descend on Denver’s Great American Beer Festival this week, hoping to take home gold, silver or bronze souvenirs. Brewers love winning medals at the nation’s largest and most-prestigious beer competition — even though no one is really sure what, if anything, these honors mean to the bottom line.

“Sometimes,” said Peter Zien, “it feels like a crapshoot.”

Case in point: Zien’s brewery, AleSmith. In 2008, the tiny Miramar operation won four medals and the “Small Brewing Company of the Year” title.

In 2009, nothing.

Both years, though, the brewery moved its entire inventory. “Every drop is basically sold the day we brew it,” said Zien, whose eight-person team brews a modest 3,000 barrels a year. “People just want our products.”

For a new company, though, a win in Denver can cement a reputation as an up-and-comer. “Winning a couple medals right out of the chute, that really helped gain recognition for the company,” said Green Flash’s brewer, Chuck Silva, who won two Great American Beer Festival medals in 2005, the same year he joined the Vista brewery.

Ribbons, medals and plaques are tangible signs of a coveted intangible object — the regard of your peers.

This is Super Bowl week for San Diego’s breweries — an expanding community of 30-plus operations that account for more than 1,000 jobs, millions in revenue and a fledgling “beer tourism” trade.

Yes, the industry is awash in competitions. But those are mere playoffs leading up to this week’s showdown in Colorado. There, hundreds of judges will assess 3,594 beers from 522 U.S. breweries (no foreigners allowed in this Great American fest). Brews are divided into 79 categories, from American-style Cream Ale or Lager — paging Hamm’s! — to styles only attempted by microbreweries with solid beer geek pedigrees — India Pale Ale (IPAs), say, or Wood- and Barrel-Aged Sour Beer.

The passion is growing for craft beer, brews produced in small batches using traditional methods. Sales of mass-marketed beers, though, have gone flat. In the first half of 2010, the U.S. beer market — dominated by multinationals like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors — saw sales fall 2.7 percent by volume.

Sales of craft beers, on the other hand, increased by 9 percent.

Why is craft beer thriving in the midst of a recession?

“In good times, beer is good,” said Vince Marsaglia, vice president of Grain to Green, a Carlsbad company that operates the Pizza Port brew pubs and the Port/Lost Abbey brewery in San Marcos. “In bad times, well, it’s still a good thing.”

Traditionally the tipple of the working class, beer is still cheaper than most wines or spirits. Prices have climbed, though, thanks in part to a hop shortage three years ago.

“Everybody raised their prices,” Zien said, “but nobody lost on that. People are willing to pay the extra money for an IPA and so on.”

Craft beer, with its range of complex flavors and aromas, has gained credibility with foodies. “Look at the Cooks Confab we had last year,” Marsaglia said, referring to a beer dinner arranged by A-list San Diego chefs. “A lot of chefs are interested in beer, when before they weren’t.”